What if Your CEO Knew the Truth About Your Business Continuity Plan?

Project and Program: MVS, MVS Storage Management

Tags: Proceedings, SHARE in Anaheim 2014, 2014

The BC preparation checklist is complete…

Bombs?  Check.
Fires?  Check.
Storms?  Check.
Earthquakes?  Check.
Other physical disasters?  Check.
Business continuity RPO and RTO objectives can be met?  Check.
 
But was your staff on the check list?  How about you vendors, contractors and suppliers?
 
The speaker for this session comes from many decades of customer support on both the user and vendor sides of the business, performing his first DR drill more than 45 years ago.  Since then, he has been onsite as a senior service rep for many real disasters and provided support for many organizations that experienced non-physical disasters.  It is this latter group of disasters where he sees great exposures… that too many IT environments have lost ‘true’ DR capability.  That is the capability to get back to operations when the BC plan doesn’t work. 
 
Physical disasters are well prepared for but are extremely rare and most organizations have a plan in place for them.  In many cases, that plan is a great business continuity structure that can provide great RPO and RTO points.  The bad news is that many of these same organizations have focused so much effort and resources on business continuity that they have lost the most basic of disaster recovery mechanisms.  This leaves them open to the most common source of all disasters, the human being.  Humans make the mistakes that completely defeat many business continuity solutions and they do so unintentionally.  What if someone did so with intent?  Can your plan survive?  If not, your employer may not. 
 
Even if your business continuity plan executes as intended where are you then?  In many, if not most, business continuity plans the answer to the question is not where you need to be.  The session will cover a number of common schemes, some that protect ‘true’ DR and some that do not.  Which example will match your plan?  If your CEO saw the examples, which one would they pick?  Would it be the one you have in place?  Are you sure?
 
The speaker for this session, Jamie Giovanetto, has an IT career that dates back over 45 years and has spent most of the past 35 years supporting customers and their BC/DR plans, either from the hardware side or the software side.  With support and speaking experience across the U.S. and internationally, Jamie has been working to encourage better BC and DR planning with his efforts seeing progress with more than one major industry vendor changing their messaging on this topic.-Jamie L. Giovanetto-J. Giovanetto Incorporated

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